Housesitting

Housesitting is broadly defined as taking care of someone’s home while they’re away. That’s it. In reality, that can mean any number of things to the homeowner: care and feeding of animals (in my experience ranging from hamsters to ponies!), looking after plants, gardens, cutting lawns, trimming hedges, sorting (and possibly forwarding) mail… The list of obligations to the housesitter can be a long and diverse one.

I’ve been housesitting since I was fourteen-years-old. My mother jumped in to help a neighbour and her two kids (7 and 10) when the woman’s husband went to the store for cigarettes and never returned. She was forced back to work, and odd shifts didn’t help matters. I began helping out, too. After about a month, I was ‘babysitting’ the two kids, but that definition was pretty ‘elastic’. I made dinners for them occasionally, made them school lunches, and put them to bed once in awhile when their mom was working nights.

A neighbour across the street saw what I was doing and one day asked if I wouldn’t mind ‘looking in’ on their two cats while they went camping one summer. They didn’t pay me, but they stocked the fridge with cans of pop, and cupboards with chips and cookies. They also had a BIG colour TV and LOTS of channels. Of course, I said ‘YES’!

Friends told friends, and by the time I was 21 I had housesat in maybe thirty different locales.

When I moved to the west coast I ‘hung out my shingle’ when an opportunity arose (a young couple eloping!), and since then I’ve been a professional housesitter with stints in Seattle, California, Japan, Italy, the U.K., and across the Lower Mainland of B.C., and Vancouver Island. I lived in Singapore for a year and housesat more than a half-dozen homes there.

On occasion I also provide home and away ‘concierge’ administration services – Confidential Estate Management – for a negotiated fee in addition to looking after the home. This can include mail scanning and forwarding, bill payments, bank deposits and transfers, pick-ups and deliveries, etc.

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Short Bio

I was published at age six and running my first entertainment company before I was out of my teens. And yes, travel is in my veins. I’ve moved 51 times in my life, including a yearlong stint in one of my very favourite cities, Singapore. Nomadic?Absolutely. Adventurous?Definitely. Homebody?Not so much. Would you like to read more...? Go here... It really is all About Me!

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The Website

Why I ‘cribbed’ When The Going Was Good for my website name is simple. It is also the title of my favourite travel book of all time. Evelyn Waugh, like a number of other famous authors (Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Graham Greene among them), was a travel writer long before he was successful in fiction. A book truly worth reading if you haven't. Highly recommended!